the best way to backup your photos

Anyone living in the modern age has struggled with the best way to make sure your photos and videos are backed up. Before I had all of my files set up to backup automatically, I used to lose sleep over what would happen if I lost Blaire’s baby photos, or the videos of her first day of life. Knowing all of those memories are living safely on a cloud give me such peace of mind.

Six years ago I used to manually put everything I wanted to back up onto an external hard drive. But then cloud storage came about and eased any worries I had about everything that could possibly go wrong with my hard drive. Cloud storage gets rid of the possibly of something happening to your hard drive because it’s not stored on a physical drive. Most cloud storage solutions also have some type of auto upload feature, meaning they’ll update whenever your phone is locked, connected to wifi, etc.

Please keep in mind these are all for personal photo storage. Most offer differing business plans.

1| Amazon Photos – for Prime Members

Cost: Free for Prime MembersIncludes: Unlimited Photo Storage / 5GB Video StorageCompatibility: Desktop (Mac or Windows), Fire Devoices, iOS and AndroidDirectly Upload Camera Role: Yes.If you don’t already have Amazon Prime, you can try it free for 30 days. We love Prime Photos because we can add up to 4 family members to share the same account. Meaning Jason doesn’t have to pay anything additional to cover his phone. Another pro, it uses software to identify what is in each photo saved, so you can search through photos based on what the software sees.

2| Dropbox

Cost: Free for 2GB or upgrade to $9.99/mo (or $99/yr) for 1TBIncludes: Photos, videos and any other types of filesCompatibility: Dropbox apps are available for Apple and Android Devices, there is desktop software available for Mac and PCs, and devices can also access Dropbox via web browser. Directly Upload Camera Role: Yes.You can sign up for Dropbox here.

3| iCloud

Cost: Free for 5GB, $.99/ month for 50GB, $2.99/month for 200GB, $9.99/month for 2TB. Includes: The ability to back up your entire device. This includes photos, videos, notes, calendar, contacts, apps, reminders, messages, etc. Compatibility: For Apple devices including iPhone, iPad and Mac. Directly Upload Camera Role: Yes. If you link your devices as a family through iTunes, it’s nice to be able to share the same iCloud plan if you choose the 200GB or the 2TB plan.

4| Google Photos

Cost: Free and unlimited space for “high quality” photos and videos. Free for 15GB of space for “original quality” photos and videos. Various plans to upgrade as you need more space. Includes: The ability to back up photos and videos.Compatibility: The Google Photos app is available for both Apple and Android devices. Directly Upload Camera Role: Yes.I am not a fan of Google photos because I prefer to keep the full version of my photos and found it to be a better value to use Amazon photos. I do believe Google Photos was the first to use software to identify what it sees in each photo. With Google photos, you can search through photos based on what the software sees.

Okay, so with all of these options, what do I do?

For personal photos and videos I use Prime Photos. I pay for 5gb of storage for videos, which cost $9.99/year. For business photos, videos and files, I pay for Dropbox.